Robert Warshow (1917—1955) was an American author, a critic and essayist, who wrote about film and popular culture for Commentary magazine and The Partisan Review in the mid-20th century. He was born and resided in New York City and attended the University of Michigan.

Among the articles published in Warshow's short lifetime were The Westerner and The Gangster as Tragic Hero, analyses of the Cowboy movie and the Gangster movie genre from a cultural standpoint. He also penned essays praising playwright Clifford Odets as well as George Herriman's newspaper comic strip Krazy Kat. The 'Idealism' of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg showed the executed American Stalinists in a brutally honest light. In an critique of The Crucible Warshow argued that Arthur Miller was not as competent a dramatist as was perceived. After Frederic Wertham and Gershon Legman, Warshow was the first serious critic to write about the video nasties of his day, E C Comics and its Mad Magazine. Mad was one of his son Paul's favorites and Warshow admitted to having read it "with a kind of irritated pleasure," though he also said that he didn't like it very much.

Warshow died of a heart attack at the age of 37. Most of his published work was collected in the book The Immediate Experience in 1962, expanded in 2001..

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